Dodgson and the Victorian Cult of the Child
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Dodgson And The Victorian Cult Of The Child a reassessment on the hundredth anniversary of 'Lewis Carroll's' death by Hugues Lebailly INTRODUCTION In this year 1998 is celebrated the hundredth anniversary of Charles Lutwidge Dodgson's death. To the many who think, with Kathleen Baker, that "what Charles Dodgson did is less interesting than what Lewis Carroll wrote", [1] that may not seem a major event. Yet, to anyone who is willing to search beyond the superficial and much prejudiced surface view of his personality still prevalent even in many learned circles, his sudden death in January 1898, a few months after those of Leighton, Millais and Burne-Jones, marks the end of an era. It abruptly put an end to one of the most exhaustive testimonies available on the reception of artistic works and cultural events of all kinds by a deeply religious member of the educated Victorian middle-class, of exceptionally eclectic interests. Such an assertion may sound paradoxical to those who still think of him as a monomaniac pervert, engrossed in a perpetual little girl hunt, attending only those plays in which child actresses filled the major parts, and attracted to Burlington House and the Grosvenor Gallery by the single hope of contemplating the latest of Millais's sentimental portraits, if not any - to us - outrageous prepubescent nudes. It would of course be preposterous to attempt to dispute the reality of that fascination, and to deny that it ever played a part in his choices of theatrical performances or in his more frequent visits to some of his painter-friends' studios. A close study of the original manuscripts of his diaries, [2] and of the hundreds of his letters collected by Morton N. Cohen , [3] will nevertheless convince any unbiased researcher that such incentives commanded but a minority of his artistic and cultural engagements, and that the range of his centres of interest was much wider than expected. Far from singling him out among the society of his time, his very attraction to the immature female form was shared in, to a lesser or higher degree, by so many of his contemporaries belonging to the literary and artistic élites, as even a cursory glance at their private writings will prove, that it should rather be read as supplementary evidence of his partaking in one of the most typical attitudes of his time. In the same way, scores of excerpts from play or exhibition notices in the Victorian periodical press can be quoted that testify for the moderation of C. L. Dodgson's praises of the performances of child-actresses, or the beauty of immature stunners on canvas, as compared to some professional critics' floods of superlatives. A far from exclusive interest All along his adult life, from his early twenties in 1855 to the very last weeks of 1897, less than a month before his death, C. L. Dodgson was an insatiable and enthusiastic theatre-goer and exhibition visitor. Over the thirty-eight years documented by his diaries - the volumes covering April 1858 to May 1862 having unfortunately disappeared - he hardly ever missed a major summer show, paying a total of 186 visits to the Royal Academy, the Grosvenor, New, and French Galleries, as well as to the British Artists and Institution, and various other minor collections. He attended no fewer than 489 theatrical performances, during which he saw 697 plays and operas, and the comments he committed to his diaries on most of them mention 870 names of actors and actresses of all ages, sometimes simply listed, but often enough supplied with some form of evaluation of the quality of their acting. If it is indeed indisputable that a majority of his stage-friends were child-actresses, but for the notable exception of the Terry sisters, Kate, Ellen, Marion, and Florence, whose acquaintances he treasured all his life, this does not reflect at all his respective amount of interest in the performances of adult and child performers. Of the 870 players nominally identified, 720 belonged to the former age group, and 150 to the latter, which is indeed far from negligible, but roughly reflects the proportion of child parts on a Victorian stage that swarmed with the moving orphans and innocent victims of their elder's cruelty indispensable to the numerous and ever successful dramatizations of Dickens's novels and adaptations of French melodramas, as well as with the cute clowns and columbines of the traditional Christmas pantomimes. C. L. Dodgson's expertise as regards the naturalness and cleverness of the youngest female members of the casts he watched perform has seldom been disputed : ample proof of this obvious competence of his is given by his being one of the very few who immediately realized the exceptional gifts of the little Mamillius in Charles Kean's revival of A Winter's Tale at the Princess's theatre in 1856. Neither The Athenaeum , The Art-Journal , nor Henry Crabb Robinson did perceive the promises this first appearance in London of the future undisputed star of the Victorian stage held in store. [4] The critic from The Times was the only professional man to pinpoint her "vivacious precocity that prove[d] her a worthy relative of her sister", Kate, already acknowledged as the rising star of the decade. [5] C. L. Dodgson, who had just launched on his own career as an assiduous Thespian devotee, did not establish a connection with an elder sister he had not seen act yet, but wrote down he had "especially admired the acting of the little Ellen Terry, a beautiful little creature, who played with remarkable ease and spirit." [6] . But the delightful vision she offered him then, and as Puck six months later, when she was also praised by A. G. C. Liddell, Henry Morley, and The Illustrated London News , whose critic claimed that she played better than he had "ever yet seen the trying part filled", [7] was far from representing the be-all and end-all of his joys as a greenhorn theatre-goer. It was to the "exquisite vision of Queen Catherine", in Charles Kean's production of Henry VIII the previous year, that he owed "the greatest theatrical treat [he] ever had or expect[ed] to have", [8] just as the equally childless Hamlet , got up later in 1855, brought him "hours of unmixed enjoyment". [9] . His enthusiasm two years later for "the exquisitely graceful and beautiful Ariel" of a thirteen-year- old Kate Terry in whom J. W. Cole also found "the true spirit of Ariel", is to be re-examined in the light of Henry Crabb Robinson's regret that she was "too large and heavy" for the part, "though a girl ... too bulky and coarse", [10] hence hardly alluring to a so-called paedophile exclusively eager for immature forms ! Moreover, a few lines further down in his much detailed account of that performance of The Tempest , still at the Princess's, C. L. Dodgson acknowledged that "Miss Carlotta Leclerque made a charming Miranda." . From a certain Miss Stewart, "a remarkable Scotch beauty" who acted 'Mrs Squiffen' in Edmund Yates and N. H. Harrington's My Friend from Leatherhead he saw at Edinburgh's Theatre Royal in that same year 1857 [11] to "a very pretty" Miss Hilda Rivers who was the 'Maggie' of L. N. Parker and E. J. Goodman's Love in Idleness at Oxford's New Theatre forty years later, [12] many were the lesser actresses whose faces or figures gladdened his eye so much that he felt urged to commit their names and physical assets to his diary. If most amateurs and professionals agreed that Miss Helen Faucit, the future Mrs Theodore Martin, "beautifully looked and acted the part" of 'Imogen' in Cymbeline at Drury Lane in 1864, [13] that Miss Mary Anderson was a "very graceful and beautiful" Greek statue whose artfully draped dress revealed much of her shapely body in Gilbert's Pygmalion and Galatea at the Lyceum in 1885, [14] or that Mrs Cyril Maude, Miss Winifred Emery by birth, was a "superb" 'Lady Babbie' in J. M. Barrie's The Little Minister in 1897, [15] who else bears witness to us of the charms of Miss Wallace, "a very pretty new actress in a minor part" of J. B. Buckstone's The Green Bushes , at the Strand in 1865, [16] or those of Miss Ione Burke, "who [was] very pretty" as 'Kate' in T. H. Bayly's Perfection at the Haymarket in 1867 ? [17] Who else paid tribute to the "young and very pretty" Miss F. Hastings, who made fun of Mary Eastlake's acting in The Silver King in W. Warham's parody of the famous play, got up at the Strand in 1883 as Silver Guilt ? [18] . Percy Fitzgerald had little fondness for Teresa Furtado, whom he described as one of those actresses "who have a noisy clientele, and whose reputation is chiefly based on physical attractions." [19] She is consequently a young lady one would hardly expect C. L. Dodgson to have admired ... and yet he found her "excellent" in J. B. Buckstone's Good for Nothing at the Adelphi, in 1864, and praised her "pretty and lively" 'Katherine Kloper' in J. S. Coyne's Pas de Fascination at the same theatre the following year ! [20] When, in October 1879, he went to hear ... and watch for the third time Offenbach's Madame Favart , adapted by H. B. Farnie, he so greatly missed the delightful Florence St John, who had "acted, and sang, most charmingly" on the two previous occasions, that he confided to his diary his "great disappointment" and his aggravation that "no apology was given" for that by the management.